Yahoo Search Shortcuts

I haven't used yahoo search too much in quite a while, but there is an interesting post in their search blog about Yahoo Shortcuts. An example is typing in !ebay lamps takes you to ebay.com and searches for lamps. (Part of me is asking, why not just go to ebay and search for lamps??? - but there are some interesting uses for this within a toolbar - I can imagine it would get you there a step or two more quickly.)

It is interesting though that you can create your own custom shortcuts. A tutorial on creating an open shortcut is here. The first link above gave a list of various shortcuts, (weather, traffic, pricing, etc.) It's a bonus to be able to create your own shortcuts in that context. That has some interesting possibilities.

You can get a list of existing shortcuts (to be used in the form of !shortcutname searchterm) by searching yahoo for !list and it will show the global and custom shortcuts in the system. !wiki term takes you to an english language wiki search for the term.